Australia's government is holding "an urgent investigation" into how hundreds of classified documents about the interior workings of several recent administrations found their way to the Australian Broadcasting Corp.

The ABC says the thousands of pages of documents had been left in two filing cabinets, which the government then sold off at a secondhand shop. The cabinets were bought cheap, the network says, because they were locked and the keys had been lost.

Inside the cabinets were records of five separate governments that spanned nearly 10 years; some of them refer to current members of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull's Cabinet.

BEIRUT/TEL AVIV (Reuters) - Israel described as “very provocative” on Wednesday a Lebanese offshore oil and gas exploration tender in disputed territory on the countries’ maritime border, and said it was a mistake for international firms to participate.

Lebanese Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, whose country considers Israel an enemy state, said the comments were one of several “threatening messages” from Israel in recent days.

Lebanese political and military movement Hezbollah vowed to defend the country’s “oil and gas rights” against Israeli threats.

Lebanon is on the Levant Basin in the eastern Mediterranean where a number of big sub-sea gas fields have been discovered since 2009, including the Leviathan and Tamar fields located in Israeli waters near the disputed marine border with Lebanon.

WASHINGTON — A test shoot of the SM-3 Block IIA fired from an Aegis Ashore test site in Hawaii failed Wednesday, CNN has reported. The missile is designed to intercept ballistic missiles.

If confirmed, it would mark the second unsuccessful test of the Raytheon missile in the past year. It also deals a setback to U.S. missile defense efforts as North Korea makes seemingly daily progress on it goal of striking the U.S. mainland with nuclear-armed missiles.

When reached for comment, U.S. Missile Defense Agency spokesman Mark Wright declined to comment on the outcome of the test.

Afghanistan has declared a national day of prayer after a string of attacks in Kabul left 130 people dead over the course of 10 days.

It's an escalation of tensions in a country that has already seen 17 years of conflict.

"It's very tense," journalist Jennifer Glasse told The Current's Anna Maria Tremonti from Kabul. "People are very nervous. People are very suspicious."

The attacks happened in areas of the city previously considered among the safest. The Taliban claimed an ambulance bomb attack in the city centre that killed 100 people, and a siege at the Hotel Intercontinental that killed 20.

PARIS (Reuters) - French President Emmanuel Macron warned Turkey that its operation against Kurdish militias in northern Syria should not become an excuse to invade the country and said he wanted Ankara to coordinate its action with its allies.

Turkey last week launched an air and ground offensive in northwest Syria, targeting the Kurdish YPG militia in the Afrin region. That has opened a new front in the seven-year-old civil war and strained ties with Turkey’s NATO allies.

“If it turns out that this operation takes a turn other than to fight a potential terrorist threat to the Turkish border and becomes an invasion operation, (then) this becomes a real problem for us,” Macon said in an interview with Le Figaro newspaper published on Wednesday.

Today in Kabul, five gunmen attacked a military academy, killing 11 soldiers and injuring 15. It was the fourth major terrorist attack in Afghanistan in just the last 10 days.

On Saturday, more than 100 people died when an ambulance packed with explosives detonated on a crowded street in the capital.

Both the Taliban and ISIS are ramping up the pace of their attacks — and the Afghan National Army isn’t effective enough to do anything about it. So President Ashraf Ghani is betting on a different strategy: drastically increasing the number of special forces troops who might stand a better chance.

ISLAMABAD — Top Afghan security officials have made a surprise visit to Pakistan, to discuss mutual cooperation with civilian and military leaders following a series of deadly Taliban and other militant attacks in Afghanistan.

The visit Wednesday took place hours after U.S. Deputy Secretary of State John Sullivan urged Afghan leaders to engage in bilateral discussions with Pakistani counterparts.

Increased militant violence in Afghanistan has fueled Kabul’s tensions with Islamabad amid accusations insurgents used sanctuaries in Pakistan to plot recent suicide bombings, with the help of the country’s spy agency, ISI.

Pakistani authorities condemned the terrorist attacks and rejected the Afghan charges as unfounded and emphasized the need for “a credible investigation” into the attacks.

The federal watchdog responsible for tracking how American tax dollars are being spent in Afghanistan claimed in a new report that the Department of Defense is deliberately attempting to obscure the extent to which the Taliban and other insurgent groups in the country are flourishing even amid the intensifying U.S.-led military campaign to batter them into submission.

In its January 2018 quarterly report to Congress, the Office of the Special Inspector General Investigator for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) indicated that the massive amount of ordnance deployed — October 2017 saw more American bombs dropped in Afghanistan during any month since 2012, when there were more than five times the number of U.S. service members in the country than there are now — and expanding the U.S. military footprint in Afghanistan, have done little, if anything, to break the stalemate.

NBC News reports that US and Afghan officials estimate the Taliban’s strength in Afghanistan to be a minimum of 60,000 fighters. This updated figure is significant, because as the report notes, for years the only previous estimate was approximately 20,000:

In 2014, US officials told NBC News that the number of Taliban fighters in Afghanistan was about 20,000. Four years later, one US defense official said the current Taliban strength is at least 60,000. Another senior U.S. official said 60,000 “passes the sniff test,” while a third official said 60,000 is “a place to start.”

An Afghan official told NBC News earlier this month that the Afghan estimate of Taliban strength is also 60,000. That marks a significant increase from the estimate of 35,000 that Afghanistan’s TOLOnews attributed to an Afghan defense official in 2011.

Given all of the information available to FDD’s Long War Journal, I believe this latest assessment to significantly more accurate. I am quoted in the above-referenced article that 60,000 would be my low-end estimate. In fact, with the amount of territory up for grabs and fighting taking place, that number could easily be doubled.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday ordered the controversial U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to remain open.

Trump announced the executive order, initially reported by POLITICO, during his first State of the Union address before a joint session of Congress. It directs the prison stay open and allows the possibility Trump could send new enemy combatants there.

"I just signed, prior to walking in, an order directing [Defense] Secretary [Jim] Mattis ... to re-examine our military detention policy and to keep open the detention facilities in Guantanamo Bay," Trump said.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Donald Trump said in his speech to Congress on Tuesday that he wanted to extend an “open hand” to work with both parties on issues like immigration but he spent most of the address facing Republicans while seldom glancing at Democrats.

In the House of Representatives chamber where Trump delivered his first “State of the Union” speech, Republicans, who sat to Trump’s left, showed their enthusiasm as he touted tax cuts and boasted of the economy’s performance.

From the Republican side of the room, Trump received around 70 standing ovations.

But Democrats, who sat to Trump’s right, were mostly silent. Many wore black, an expression of solidarity with victims of sexual misconduct that added to the funereal mood on their side of the room.

UN special envoy defends presence at Sochi talks after criticism from Syrian opposition

A 50-strong commission representing most strands of Syrian society will draft a new constitution for the country, the UN and Russia have agreed at the end of a peace conference put together by Vladimir Putin in the Russian Black Sea resort of Sochi.

The UN special envoy Staffan de Mistura faced intense criticism from the Syrian opposition for attending the conference, which the opposition boycotted on the basis that it was an attempt to supplant the UN peace process and marginalise their role in ending Syria’s seven-year civil war.

The U.S. would likely only have a warning time of a "dozen minutes or so" if North Korea launched a missile in its direction, the military's second highest-ranking official said Tuesday.

Joint Chiefs of Staff Vice Chairman Gen. Paul Selva said Pyongyang had cut the warning time down from an hour thanks to its use of mobile launch trucks, so much so that the U.S. would likely not be able to get an early warning "other than if we got lucky and saw the movement of the launch mechanism to the launch platform."

Yet Selva said North Korean leader Kim Jong Un is still unable to strike the U.S. with an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) as far as the Pentagon has observed.

Pornographic film star Stormy Daniels on Tuesday added another twist to the did-they-or-didn't-they saga of whether she had an affair with President Donald Trump several years ago, saying she didn't know where a denial of the alleged affair issued in her name came from.

In a short statement attributed to Daniels and provided by her publicist on Tuesday, the actress was quoted as saying, "I am denying this affair because it never happened."

Late Tuesday, in an appearance on ABC's "Jimmy Kimmel Live," Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, remained silent when Kimmel began asking her about the reports. He then pointed out what appeared to be discrepancies between her signature on Tuesday's statement and her signature on a previous statement and promotional materials.

When Daniels agreed that the signature on Tuesday's statement didn't look the same, Kimmel asked her whether she knew where the statement came from. She hesitated and then said, "I do not know where it came from."

The Hawaii state employee responsible for launching an erroneous January 13 warning of an incoming missile attack has been fired, following a report stating that the employee had a history of confusing practice exercises with real-life events.

The information was revealed Tuesday in a report by Investigating Officer Bruce Oliveira to the director of Hawaii's Emergency Management Agency.

Vern Miyagi, the administrator for the agency, resigned Tuesday, as the findings became public.

WNU Editor: So the person who had a long history of confusing practice exercises with real-life events was able to still keep his job until this week. I like to know who did he know so that he could keep his job.

Dispensing with the heavy cannon, munitions and turret alone removes about 20 tonnes from a modern main battle tank

"A future manned node is more than likely to never operate without a phalanx of unmanned or supporting platforms - from drones for sensors, mine / booby trap hunters, long range / reach weapons like missiles, or traditional “air cover” or traditional infantry support"

The idea of armored fighting vehicles dates from before da Vinci and is the latest iteration of the mounted heavy Cavalry and war elephants. The advent of the internal combustion engine made possible vast increases in energy, which in turn, made practical vehicles with more protection and offensive armament.

Balancing off tradeoffs between firepower, mobility, and protection within the confines of a mass limitation of roughly 70 tonnes (the amount most roads and bridges can carry); a form factor that can be readily transported by rail, road, and ship; that adequately protect the occupants is the task of an AFV designer.

Members of Chinese People's Liberation Army (PLA) take part in the national flag-raising ceremony to mark the New Year, the first since it took over the duty from paramilitary police, on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, China January 1, 2018. REUTERS/Stringer

BEIJING (Reuters) - China must strengthen its nuclear deterrence and counter-strike capabilities to keep pace with the developing nuclear strategies of the United States and Russia, the official paper of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) said on Tuesday.

U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration may be pursuing the development of new nuclear weaponry and could explicitly leave open the possibility of nuclear retaliation for major non-nuclear attacks, according to a draft of a pending Nuclear Posture Review leaked by the Huffington Post.

This “unprecedented” move by the United States, combined with continuous quality improvements of nuclear arsenals in both the U.S. and Russia, means that both countries place greater importance on deterrence and real combat usability, the commentary in the PLA Daily said.

“In the roiling unpredictability of today’s world, to upgrade the capability of our country’s deterrence strategy, to support our great power position... we must strengthen the reliability and trustworthiness of our nuclear deterrence and nuclear counterstrike capabilities,” it said.

WNU Editor: There is currently a conventional arms race in Asia .... An Asian Arms Race Is Underway (January 30, 2018). But talk from China about expanding its nuclear capabilities will probably spark in a nuclear arms race with India .... while making other countries in the region wonder if they should also have nuclear weapons.

China and Russia are developing anti-satellite missiles and other weapons and will soon be capable of damaging or destroying all U.S. satellites in low-earth orbit, according to the Pentagon's Joint Staff.

The Joint Staff intelligence directorate, known as J-2, issued the warning in a recent report on the growing threat of anti-satellite (ASAT) weapons from those states, according to officials familiar with the assessment.

The report concludes that "China and Russia will be capable of severely disrupting or destroying U.S. satellites in low-earth orbit" in the next several years, said the officials.

The capability to attack low-earth orbit satellites could be in place by 2020, the officials said.

WNU Editor: No one would win in such a conflict. War in space will probably result in the dispersion of massive amounts of debris that will make space .... at least at the lower elevations .... impossible to use for decades.

Gen. Selva: U.S. space capabilities are increasingly easier to track and monitor.

WASHINGTON — The United States is right to be worried about competitors catching up in the race for space supremacy, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Air Force Gen. Paul Selva said Tuesday.

Defending space is hard because U.S. secrets are out in the open, Selva said during a breakfast meeting with reporters.“We’ve yielded an awful lot of ground to the Russians and the Chinese in space security.”

Space and cyber warfare experts like Gen. John Hyten, commander of U.S. Strategic Command, have warned that China and Russia are developing “counter space capabilities” such as electronic jammers and advanced signal scramblers specifically to target U.S. military satellites.

Selva said he agrees with Hyten about the seriousness of these threats. But even more alarming, he said, is the idea that U.S. space capabilities are becoming easier to track and attack if someone were determined to do it.

The government of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, hated by much of the country's population and sanctioned by a growing number of countries, is facing problems keeping the police and military happy as food shortages and hyperinflation start to hit their barracks.

Recent meetings and internal documents of the Venezuelan armed forces point to concern in the Maduro regime as troops grow more demoralized and commanders report an increase in the number of insubordination cases and desertions.

In addition to the signs of unrest among the Army and National Guard units, the government also faces a tense relationship with the investigative police agency known by its initials in Spanish, CICPC, after the recent public execution of rebel policeman Oscar Perez, who was killed by security forces in an assault broadcast live through social media.

About Me

I have been involved in numerous computer science projects since the 1980s, as well as developing numerous web projects since 1996.
These blogs are a summation of all the information that I read and catalog pertaining to the subjects that interest me.